Mother Shipton and her weirdly accurate prophecies
It's Harry Potter's birthday, but because of certain people's actions, let's focus on a famous witch from history! Well. Witch may be wrong. But she's definitely in internet lists of witches, so here's Mother Shipton (1488-1561):
Okay, so Mother Shipton was in fact Ursula Southeil, and if you're like me, you're wondering how they got from A to B there in the naming department. There is a mothershipton.co.uk and according to THEM:
When she was twenty-four she met a young man by the name of Tobias Shipton. He was a carpenter from the city of York. Tobias died a few years later, before they had any children, but Ursula kept his name, Shipton. The Mother part followed later, when she was an old woman.
I like that it doesn't say she married Tobias Shipton; she just met him and then he died but she had his name now, mwahahaha. There's a whole lot you can go down, rabbit hole-wise, with her. Mainly:
1) She lived mainly during Henry VIII's reign, but also saw Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I take the throne (weird!) 2) Local people called her "Hag Face"??? Which is so rude I cannot get over it. Can you imagine anyone being like "oh yeah, that's Mother Shipton. Or 'Hag Face' as we like to say" and you being like "oh sure, catchy." 3) She maybe predicted some things like the London Fire of 1666 but also we don't know??
This is literally a line from her wiki bio: "Quite who Mother Shipton was or what exactly she said is not definitively known."
Good lord.
But she was really famous, starting in at least the 17th century! And Daniel Defoe references her in a 1722 book. There's a cave where she was apparently born called Mother Shipton's Cave, and yes it IS right next to the River Nidd, like a gd fairytale.
She died in her 70s, which is very impressive for the 1500s, and if you want to read more about her prophecies and when they were written, check out this blog post.